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Critical Hope: How to Grapple with Complexity, Lead with Purpose, and Cultivate Transformative Social Change - Softcover
Inhaltsangabe
Introducing the 7 principles for practicing critical hope--because hope isn’t something you have; it’s something you do.
Each person has a unique, ever-changing relationship to hope.
Hope alone can be transformational--but in moments of despair, or when you’re up against profound injustice, it isn’t enough on its own. Hope without action is, at best, naive. At its worst, it tricks you into giving up the power and agency you have to change systems that cause suffering.
Enter critical hope: a spark of passion, an abiding belief that transformation is not just possible, but vital. This is hope in action: a vibrant, engaged practice and a commitment to honoring transformative potential across a vast spectrum of experience.
Dr. Kari Grain, PhD, offers 7 principles for practicing critical hope:
The principles for practicing critical hope are not what you might think: they confront toxic positivity and take up discomfort, social injustices, and an ethos of hospitality toward anger and grief. But held in this same space is a love for connection–and an honoring of what makes you feel alive.
Inspired by her global research, teaching experiences, and education curriculum taught at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Grain shows that to cultivate critical hope--and combat despair--you need to show up with your whole self, in all its messy, passionate, vibrant complexity.
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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor
KARI GRAIN, PhD, is a university educator whose work centers on global engagement, transformative learning, and social justice. Throughout her writing and teaching (as well as her everyday life), she weaves a love for relational, embodied, and experiential ways of knowing the world. Her professional path has included waitressing for nearly ten years; running diversity and human rights education programs; and leading in-school learning opportunities for immigrant and refugee youth. Grain earned her PhD in Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia, where she is a faculty member in the Adult Learning and Global Change master's program. She teaches courses on community engaged research, leadership, and social change, and is currently collaborating as a co-editor of a volume on these topics. Grain also consults with organizations to enhance their community engagement practices and equity and inclusion strategies. Her work has been featured in various academic journals, podcasts, and websites.
Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.
Surviving the Holocaust
I keep a black and white photo of Pinchas Gutter in a small box of pictures on my bookshelf. He leans against a tree at Auschwitz, a concentration camp where 1.1 million people were murdered under the Nazi regime. In the photo, he pensively gazes outward as tourists pass by in the background. He appears to stand with tired strength, clearly using the tree to support his aged body. In my mid-twenties, I (along with dozens of other young adults) walked beside Pinchas through several Holocaust sites in Poland and Germany. Sometimes we said nothing. Other times we spoke, told stories, asked questions. We cried. It was all part of a non-denominational education program called “The March of Remembrance and Hope,” which involved months of preparation, reading, history lessons, and group phone calls. Following that, we met up in Toronto, flew to Europe, and spent a week touring death camps and Holocaust memorials with two Holocaust survivors – Pinchas Gutter and Judy Cohen. Each night our program leaders brought us together in small groups for incredibly emotional debriefs that I remember as spaces of grief and connection.
Whenever I look at that photo of Pinchas, I wonder if the people in the background had any idea that survivors were among them. I wondered how it would change their experience if they knew that. To me, Pinchas and Judy’s presence somehow breathed life and sacredness into the space, and heightened the experience to an emotional degree that would otherwise be difficult to establish. I snapped that photo of Pinchas because he spent so much time educating young people about the horrors of the Holocaust, and sharing his heartbreaking memories with us. Throughout our week-long trip, he was usually flanked by students, program leaders, and close friends, and I remember walking closely beside him at Majdanek, which is where his own Holocaust survival story took place.
But in that moment captured in the photograph, he was alone at Auschwitz, unaccompanied by any of the students, unaccompanied by friends. He seemed to have taken an intentional moment away from all of us. I was struck by the thin line that separated the early 1940s from this very moment: more than half a century, a world of changed circumstances, but still the same threat of unchecked hatred, quiet anti-semitism, pervasive racism. It is a strange thing to walk on the very earth where unthinkable suffering occurred, and where horrific violence was once committed. When it is not your own memory of that place, the landscape can seem so harmless. Daisies dance in the breeze, a bird sings joyfully from the treetops, momentarily perches on the infamous “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work sets you free”) gate and then flits away to its next destination.
For so many folks walking around the grounds of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Dachau – these memorials are educational spaces, places to learn about a distant historical event that irrevocably shaped global politics and shook the very foundations of humanity. But for someone who experienced Nazi Germany, whose family was wiped out by a hateful ideology and its arbiters (and a nation state that itself committed and sanctioned such atrocities), what was it like to stand alone, leaning against a tree in this place? Does the land hold that pain? Does it stay for a while, like rainwater in the soil? Does the grass grow tall from the stories woven throughout its roots? Do the trees know their limbs contain molecular ashes of the dead, and that their leaves inhaled the carbon dioxide mingled with a million burned bodies? -Each body of those million bodies, a precious human life once rich with possibility, imbued with the love of family, friends, and lovers. Do the trees stand now as living witnesses to lives lost and families destroyed? Did the earth watch and weep as it all went down, knowing that its only option was to hold steady until time marched humankind into a different era? When I look at that photo of Pinchas leaned against a tree, I have so many questions, and they are questions that I have the responsibility to grapple with – now, and long after Pinchas leaves us.
On the morning when our tour bus did eventually make its way to Majdanek, where Pinchas had been abused and imprisoned as an eleven-year-old boy, it was a windy and overcast day. Majdanek was a concentration camp at the outskirts of Lublin during Germany’s occupation of Poland in World War II. In its early days, it was used as a forced labour camp for 50 000 Soviet Prisoners of War (most of whom died from appalling work conditions, starvation, and epidemics). It is estimated that 78 000 people were murdered at Majdanek, roughly 60 000 of whom were Jews, and up to 20 000 of whom were non-Jewish Poles[1]. I will never forget when Pinchas stood in a small meadow and had us gather around while he told us his story. Behind Pinchas stood an other-worldly circular structure, the Majdanek Mausoleum, where the ash remains of Holocaust victims were collected into a mound after the liberation of the camp. Pinchas’ mother, father, and twin sister were among the victims whose ashes rest there.
Pinchas proceeded to recount the fateful day when his family was forced onto a train with other Jews, and taken to the very place where we stood. His voice shook and his shoulders heaved as he described his final memories of his father, mother and sister. They had all traveled together by train, and when they disembarked at Majdanek, the Nazi soldiers instructed all the boys and men to go in one line, and all the girls and women to go in another. He described the anguish, as a young boy, of being separated from his mother and his twin sister. He still regretted, he said through tears, that he could not remember the face of his twin sister. Instead, his final and vivid memory is of her long blonde braid swaying in the wind, as she was led away to the gas chambers. Pinchas’ face was dappled with droplets, and it was impossible to discern how many of them were from the rain and how many from his tears.
We all sat silently, save for a few who were audibly weeping in the embrace of one another. Everyone processed it differently, but I remember a palpable feeling of oneness among our group. The place, the oral history of an unthinkable event that had played out exactly where we sat. It is one thing for a young boy to endure an experience like that, and it is another thing entirely to grow old with the weight of those memories, and to take a group of strangers to the very meadow where it occurred - to bear your soul, to display your anguish for all to see. To relive the trauma. To willingly return to that place of suffering again and again, in the name of remembrance. In the name of hope. This is what it means to bear witness in the truest sense: To listen, support, empathize, and stand in solidarity with another person, and to walk with them through the spectrum of ugly and poignant emotions that arise in the communication and sharing of trauma. To bear witness is to “understand the structures that sustain aggression and hatred”[2]
Pinchas’ courage to share stories, to willingly wade into historical trauma again and again, is at the crux of transformative education for human rights, and it relies on the critical hope of victims and witnesses who, despite suffering, believe that stories have the power to honour the past and change the future. Perhaps it is this commitment to education that, since the time I shared with him at Majdanek, led Pinchas to write and publish his memoir, a book called Memories in Focus[3]. He has also been actively involved in an innovative project called “Dimensions in Testimony[4],” which preserves genocide survivor testimonies in life-sized three-dimensional specialized display...
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